You Can’t Take the Human Out of Automation

On : April 17, 2019

AI
is merely a tool and like all tools it exists for humans to use effectively or
not. The message from Emily Ketchen,
HP’s regional head of marketing, Americas, is that automation without humanness
is less effective. AI can ferret out the
signals of customer intentions, but if there is no human intervention or there’s
the wrong intervention, chances for a sale are reduced.

Intent
behavior may be signaled “when customers make purchases, look for products
online, click on banner ads or leave comments about a brand on a social media
site.” But the signal alone has little
value if it is not acted upon. It’s time
for the humans to read the tea leaves – to know where in the buying cycle the
potential customer is and to respond in kind. Earlier in the process suggests
one response while later in the process requires another.

Ketchen
says its has been HP’s experience that when the right response delivers a “personalized
ad or landing page combined with humanness, response rates jump an average of
20 to 30%.” By contrast, if the response
in not timely, if the response takes “more than 10 minutes [it] can decrease
the odds of qualifying that prospect by up to 400%.” Source:
AdExchange

Three Rules for Social Media Content

On : April 1, 2019

Blasting social media content
without regard for how its being delivered and where its going is not a
marketing approach. Here are three guard
rails designed to keep your social media marketing on track.

Assume that all social media posts are a sales pitch
though the content may not be very aggressive in tone and make sure that your
story supports the interests and concerns of the kind of people who buy your
product(s).

Sixty years ago Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The medium is
the message.” The adage still applies. Understand each social medium for what
is. The long form content that works on
Facebook is not suited to Twitter’s limitations. Instragram demands pictures over copy and You
Tube prefers video over copy. Lesson:
Just as the content has to fit the audience (rule 1), it must fit the delivery
medium. Both have to be in sync.

Finally, your social media content needs to reflect
your business. Keeping it close, keeping
it in-house will assure it’s written from a personal point of view. That will keep it original and most likely
interesting to your customers. Source:
Forbes

In AI: It’s all about the Rule Set

On : March 27, 2019

Tom
Ohanian, global sales executive for IBM Watson Media & Weather. speaking at
the Smart Hollywood Summit reduced the AI challenge to its essence when he
said, “It comes
down to these two questions: Can we produce content in a way that’s acceptable,
and can we break these down to rule sets?”

In
real life it is necessary to switch these questions around because to get
acceptable content out of the machine, one must start with a rule set that can
deliver a simulated human expression – which leads to a realization that we
have come to understand while working with AI content creation. AI can produce content, but just as a pool of
writers needs an editor, a human editor, so does the machine. The more sophisticated the machine, the
closer it can get to natural language – Watson is among the best – but still,
before synthetically created content goes out, a human needs to be the last
reader. Source: Smart Content News;
Bidwin analysis

The Ratio: Traditional v. Digital Marketing

On : March 20, 2019

It has been obvious for some years that digital marketing has been siphoning off ad dollars from traditional media. Print media has suffered the most, especially among those publishers that did not make the digital adjustment made by The New York Times and the Washington Post.

For
marketers, the question is how to proportion their ad dollars between the
two. It appears the pendulum is still
swinging toward digital because marketers know instinctually, if not actually,
that 60% of us check our Facebook timeline once a day, that 66% of last year’s
Black Friday and Cyber Monday purchases were made via mobile phone according to
Shopify and that 97% of business-to-business marketers favor LinkedIn.

So,
where are you on the digital-traditional scale? 60% -40% or 70% -30%? Source: Business Insider

Video: the New Word-of-Mouth

On : March 15, 2019

For those of us who spend inordinate amounts of time watching You Tube videos about the obscurities of life or the momentary interests of life (Samurai Carpenter is the best) know the instinctual truth of the researcher who claims that videos are shared 1,200% more than web links or text. For marketers that fact is should be a light bulb. If social media and content marketing are an attempt at artificially re-creating word-of-mouth, then video dramatically ups the ante.

In
a Forbes article, Scott Darrohn suggests that to make the most of your video
marketing, keywords should be inserted in a video’s title, description and
URL. They will draw more search
responses and search responses will lead to more link sharing, hence expanded
“word-of-mouth.” Source: Forbes

Maximizing a Core Mobile Advantage: Location

On : March 13, 2019

Reality: With all the next level, automated marketing schemes that are claimed today, the most fundamental of all, location targeting, is still at the core – particularly with mobile devices. Location is the most basic feedback we get from mobile phones. Everything else is one step removed from an educated inference.

Given
that reality, there are a couple ways to get more from location data than we
do:

Geo-Fencing – identifying and pushing a message to a phone based on
their current location.

Geo-Targeting – identifying and pushing a message to a phone based on a
past location.

Geo-Conquesting – identifying phones that have been at a competitor’s
location and messaging them.

In
all cases, advertisers do need to take care not to target individuals. Rather, to protect privacy, they need to
“aggregate and anonymize [data], to prevent any individual tracking.” Source: MarketingLand

The 5G Future

On : March 11, 2019

5G’s
advantage is simple: speed. The
predictions say the new generation will range from “10 times and 1,000 times
faster than 4G.” This pattern of
continuously faster technology has been seen before in ever advancing desktop
computer speeds.

Reality
is there’s never enough speed because it’s speed that allows all other benefits
such as more, better data. True to form,
5G promises more immediate data. Based
on where we are with today’s level of data – the vast majority of which is not
used – this fresh data dump carries lots of promise, but is likely to be more
hyperbole.

The
most immediate advantage of added speed for advertisers will be with load times
for images and video. Instant video is
appealing and, in itself, could increase viewability and change the balance of
content from written to visual. Game
time is next year. Source: AdExchanger

Cars as Lifestyle: China’s NIO Goes After Tesla

On : March 5, 2019

60 Minutes ran a story about the Chinese electric car
company NIO (pronounced Neo) that was founded by billionaire William Li. He’s successfully selling a car that combines
technology, lifestyle and national pride to the upper-middleclass in
China. Watch 60 Minutes Overtime video
for a flavor of the report. Sources: 60
Minutes, CNBC

IAB is Upping the Ante for Data Reliability

On : March 4, 2019

We have made the point before that the toughest regulations
from the big players rule the market.
Such is the case with Europe’s GDPR regulations, which are driving
buying practices in all Western markets.
An example of its power is seen in the new IAB Tech Lab proposed
framework outlining new “required disclosures for those collecting data to be
used for targeting, personalizing and measuring digital ads, [which] also lays
out minimum disclosures that data sellers must offer their possible customers.”

Quality advertisers can be expected to demand details such
as the origin of the data, the data’s age and data associations like
individual, household or business.

In addition, the IAB is offering a standardized lexicon for
key terms, which is intended to assure that both buyers and sellers are
speaking the same language. Together,
the framework and the lexicon raise the game for digital advertising reliability. Source: AdAge

Familiarity and Interesting Creatives are Keys to Mobile Success

On : March 1, 2019

According
to a survey of 1,000 adults by AKI Technologies attention grabbing mobile ads
benefit from several elements, key among them are familiarity and interesting
creatives, which are often interlaced.
While familiarity is often the result of longevity in the market, it can
also happen very quickly with great, compelling advertising. Many old brands have learned the hard way that
tired creatives can turn their good will sour, particularly compared to the
newest shiny object in their category. Keep it fresh. Source: MediaPost